'Washington: The Making of the American Capital'

By Fergus M. Bordewich

Updated May 2, 2008 10:04 p.m. ET

Prologue

Washington, D.C., is today as much a site of national pilgrimage as it is a seat of government. For schoolchildren disembarking by the hundreds of thousands each year along the Mall, and for millions of other Americans and foreign visitors, to travel to Washington is to seek some kind of communion with the secular civic religion that is embodied in its temple like buildings and the democratic institutions they enshrine. Viewed from the top of the Washington Monument, the sepulchral monuments to past presidents and to wars won and lost, the massive government buildings, museums, foreign embassies, and the...